The Independent Study module last year was essential in helping us to develop research skills that are vital in many aspects of studying English Language. It also encouraged us to become more motivated and showed us the importance of completing work independently. The first task we had to do was to create our own questionnaire, which taught us how to construct questions to receive honest, unbiased answers. The analysis of these results extended our skills further. The second task of transcribing enabled us to successfully record spoken language for the purpose of analysis. Writing a literature review taught us how to skim an article for important information, digest that information, and use it in our own writing in a concise and relevant way. The final task of the corpus investigation highlighted how essential a corpus is to both research and analysis. As a whole the module gave us an opportunity to pick up skills that will be invaluable over the rest of our degree, and hopefully our future careers.